And Yet So Far
by Sister Coyote
Summary: Cloud wanted to see her, but he didn't want her to see him. Backstory/pre-canon. One-sided Cloud/Tifa, Zack.


If you wanted a good deal on the best food in town, Zack could tell you that the best place in Midgar to go wasn't the fancy restaurants or emporiums above-plate. It was the market on the edge of Sector Three, where farmers and traders from all around set up stalls or sold straight out of the back of their trucks. Cloud was still comparatively new to Midgar—new, skittish of the big city, inclined to stick close to the barracks and stay on top of the plate. It was a habit that Zack was bound and determined to train him out of, and if that meant hauling him down to Sector Three and feeding him questionable hot wrapped sandwiches bought from even more questionable stall-owners, so much the better.

"— so he said, 'That's worth five hundred gil,' which I knew it wasn't—he'd probably got the damn thing out of one of those Shinra collectible catalogues, you know?" he said, weaving his way through the market with Cloud in tow.

"Yeah?"

"So I said—" He broke off as the color drained out of Cloud's face and Cloud took a sudden step back. Zack, trying to keep in step with him, took a half-step back as well and nearly tripped as Cloud ducked behind him. "Hey, what's up?"

"Nothing!" Cloud said. "Just, um—nothing." But he still looked as though he'd had all the blood sucked out of him, his eyes startle-wide, and he was trying to edge behind a stall.

"Seriously, what?" Zack followed him into the shadow of the stall.

"Look, can we go another way around?" Zack just had to raise his eyebrows, and Cloud gave up. "There's someone I don't want to run into, okay? It's kind of embarrassing."

"Who?" He peered around the stall.

"At the truck selling apples and brandy," Cloud mumbled.

Zack could see the rusty old truck, piled high with apple crates, and in front of it a skinny old woman with bird-sharp eyes. "What, the old bat? Whadya do, steal an apple?" He looked back at Cloud, a smirk beginning. "—Or is it a more personal kind of trouble?"

"What? No! The other one."

"Which—" he began, and then he saw her: a girl, no more than Cloud's own age, sitting on one of the crates. All he could see was the bottom half of her profile under a big country hat, and the trailing ends of long black hair spilling down her back. "—oh. So it _was_ trouble of a personal nature," he said, just to hear Cloud's outraged "_Zack_."

"Okay, okay," he conceded. "So you know her?"

"Knew her."

"Knew her. And you don't want to see her that badly? Is she some kind of awful harpy or something? 'Cause she looks pretty harmless."

Cloud's suddenly shaking head made him think, _Oh, quite the opposite, I guess._ "No," Cloud said. "No. Um. It's." The color had returned to his face, and didn't seem to know when to stop: where just a few minutes prior he'd been chalk-white, he was now turning an impressive shade of pink. "It's _Tifa_."

"Oh," Zack said. "_Oh_."

"Yeah," said Cloud, the pink accelerating. He was so fair, he could be made to blush easily and spectacularly, which amused Zack (with his stable Gongagan complexion) no end. It looked like the tips of his ears were preparing to burst into flame.

"Maybe I should make you talk to her," he said.

"No! No no no," Cloud said. "Not a chance." Which was a good sign, actually—not that many weeks before he would have gone wooden and started calling him 'Sir' by now.

"C'mon. It's not like you don't talk _about_ her enough. First few months, every third word out of your mouth was 'Tifa.' Might as well talk _to_ her, too."

Cloud gave him an agonized look. "I _can't_."

"Sure you can. It's not like talking to girls is that hard."

"For you."

"Nah, really. Girls are just people. I'm sure she'd be glad to see you."

"You just say that because she'd be glad to see you if you were me. I mean. If you were in my position. But everybody likes _you_."

"That's not true."

"Well maybe not everybody, but most people. —Anyway, that's beside the point. I can't talk to her. I just can't."

"Why not?"

Cloud's eyebrows drew together, half-pleading. "She mumble mumble mumble," he said.

"What?"

"I said she—" His voice dropped to near-inaudibility. "—thinks I'm in SOLDIER."

"Oh," said Zack, and there was an awkward pause. Then, to fill the silence, he said, "Well, I'm going to go talk to her, at least."

"You _are_?" Cloud asked. "Why?"

"You talk about her all the time. I'm curious." He stepped out of the shadow of the stall.

"Zack—"

"Yeah?"

"Don't say anything _embarrassing_."

"Who, me?" he asked, and laughed at Cloud's disbelieving expression.

* * *

Midgar was hot, and dirty, and crowded, and the air under the plate was stale and pretty nasty compared to Nibelheim. Miss Arbash was right about all of those things, but Tifa was _still_ having a wonderful time. She found herself hoping (guiltily, but nonetheless hoping) that Raka would get sick more often, so she could come help with the apple selling again.

For one thing, the sheer variety of people she saw dazzled her. There were clothes of all kinds—she even thought she saw someone go past in Wutaian garb—and she saw a girl with her hair dyed a wild shade of green, and a man with tattoos all up and down his bare arms, and on the carts were fruits she had never seen, and bolt upon bolt of fancy brocade from the Junon textile mills, and clockwork toys, and silk flowers that might as well have been real, and real cut flowers more exotic than anything she'd seen cut in buckets for just a few gil, and —

— and a SOLDIER—even a backwater girl like her knew that uniform when she saw it—asking something. He was _very_ good-looking, with dark hair and dark skin like she'd never seen on a Nibelheim native. She wondered what Cloud looked like, in that uniform. It'd been more than a year since she'd seen him—how much might he have grown and filled out, with all that training?

"I'm sorry, what?" she asked, sitting up straighter. "Um. Sir?"

"Don't have to call me 'sir,' you're definitely not one of my enlistees. I'd remember your face, for sure." He was grinning, white teeth against tanned skin. She knew from experience with boys that his mild flirting meant nothing, was just intended to make her feel good, but knowing that didn't make it not work. "I just wanted an apple."

"Oh." She could feel herself starting to blush. "Sure. They're two gil per pound, or ten gil a crate . . . ?"

"Just one," he said. She bit the inside of her lip to keep from inane, nervous giggling, and picked out a particularly nice apple, burnished gold with a leaf still clinging to the stem-end.

"Here," she said. "Si—I mean—"

"Zack," he said, and, to her surprise, held out his hand.

"Tifa," she said, and took it. Emboldened by his friendliness, she said, "If you don't mind, can I ask you a question?"

"Shoot."

"One of my friends came to Midgar to be a SOLDIER. Cloud. Cloud Strife. I was wondering—I mean, I know Shinra is really big, but—you don't happen to know him, do you? I was just wondering how he was doing. If he was okay."

"Cloud?" Zack tossed the apple from one hand to the other. "Yeah, I know him. He's doing just fine. Still getting used to the city, though."

"It's really something," she said. "So big. So many people."

"It's overwhelming, but you get accustomed to it." He tossed her two gil—considerably more than the apple was worth—and said, "Keep the change. Do something fun with it before you head home, hey?"

She grinned back without even meaning to. "I will. Say hello to Cloud for me."

Zack gave her a flippant salute, and strode off into the crowd.

* * *

Cloud planted his feet to keep from hopping impatiently from one to the other as Zack returned. "So? What'd you say? What'd _she_ say?"

"Not much. She seems to be doing well." Zack tossed him the apple. He turned it over, then took a bite. It was sharp but sweet, familiar—a Nibelheim gold, for certain. "She asked about you."

He nearly choked. "What'd you say?"

Zack shrugged. "That you're doing fine. Sounded like she missed you. Are you sure you don't want to talk to her?"

He glanced back, at the familiar profile—she'd pushed her hat back on her head and was eating an apple herself. And oh, he wanted to, but—"Yes. Positive."

"If you're sure, I won't try to make you," Zack said. "But I think you should."

"I know. I don't think it'd be a good idea." She was smiling there in the dim light, eating her apple, and he didn't know if he could lie to her _to her face_, and she'd hate him if she found out.

"Someday," Zack said in his put-upon voice, "I will convince you that not everybody is out to get you, if it's the last thing I do."

"Yes. Someday," Cloud said, "in between the time I make it into SOLDIER, and the time pigs learn to fly to the moon."

"Damn straight," said Zack.


End file.
